


Excuses and writing notes

by Insecuriosity



Category: The Amazing World of Gumball
Genre: Attempted Suicide, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 03:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12202794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Insecuriosity/pseuds/Insecuriosity
Summary: Larry Needlemeyer is an underappreciated hard worker, and life has dealt him bad hand after bad hand. He hasn't been okay for a very long time, and he can no longer see a way out of the pit of depression he is in. He tries, and he does his best, but without any help, he is not going to succeed.tl;dr:  How the heck does Larry cope with doing all the work and getting no thanks? He doesn't.





	Excuses and writing notes

**Author's Note:**

> Written in one go and unedited. If you find mistakes, feel free to let me know!

Coming home was a rare luxury to Larry Needlemeyer. 

Technically, he had every Sunday off – a wonderful 24 hours to do whatever he needed to keep himself standing during the rest of the week. Things like eating a meal that wasn’t a leftover from Joyful Burger, and sleeping on a matrass instead of trying to sleep behind a cash register without anyone noticing.  
Sadly, the last three weeks there had been emergencies on the job. Or, well, all of them. Ice cream machines breaking down, a robbery, an aisle of winebottles falling over, an alarm going off, an insect infestation….

Larry hadn’t seen his bed in so long that his hands were shaking, and that there were dark shadows moving around in his peripheral vision. 

His home was small and underkept. His feet kicked through the small pile of bills that had collected behind his door, and landed in the puddle of water that came from the one leak that never seemed to go away. There was a definite reason as to why his apartment was one of the cheapest in Elmore. 

In about one hour, he had the night shift at the Gas station. It was on the other side of town, so detracting the amount of traveling time, he would have a nice 45 minutes of rest. 

He didn’t feel like sleeping, in all honesty. It wasn’t restful. His dreams, if you could even call them that, were like an endless loop of his jobs. Tasks he had to repeat over and over, the worst parts of his customers blended together, endless performance interviews with all his bosses.  
And when he woke up he’d get to do it all again in real life. 

He slipped open his phone, and winced at the sharp blue light. It was late. Karen would, in all likelihood, still be asleep, but Larry wasn’t sure when he’d get another chance to send her a message. His schedule was packed, and he couldn’t take days off. There’d been an ‘incident’ in the pet store, and all the lost animals ( and their catch fees ) were going to get subtracted from his wage. 

She had been distant lately. Larry knew what that meant, and he wasn’t… he wasn’t really surprised. He pulled out his plastic flip-chair, and sat down. The plastic creaked ominously, but it held. 

Even as he typed a quick message asking how her day was, and that he loved her, he knew that he’d been neglecting her. Not wilfully, but just…. There was no time. He had no more energy in his body. Even just the act of typing a small message felt like a herculean effort after a day of yelling customers and scrubbing floors on hands and knees. 

He sent the message, and put his phone back into his pocket. He wasn’t sure how long she was going to keep indulging him in their engagement. He’d had to sell the ting he’d planned on proposing to her with, just to keep his apartment.  
He’d saved up money again, but then there’d been that robbery of the bank… Gone were his savings. 

“What isn’t gone, at this point.” He mumbled to himself. 

He closed his eyes, and measured his fatigue. Despite the lead that had settled in his limbs and head, he knew it was going to take a while before he fell asleep. 

He forced his eyes open again, and scooted his chair a little closer to his table. He might as well continue trying to write his suicide note.  
He didn’t want to come across as one of those people that blamed the world for his suffering and loneliness. He didn’t really want to invoke pity, but it didn’t feel right to just go and leave nothing behind. Writing a suicide note with those criteria was surprisingly difficult. His trash-pile ( no money for a bin after the last one got lost ) was full of unfinished and rejected drafts. 

At least he’d finally come to a decision about the method, and that already really helped. As a rock, bleeding out had never been an option, but strangulation had been pretty high on his list. It felt perverse and bad to admit it, but there was something like a feeling of satisfaction in him whenever he imagined someone walking in on his corpse.  
His boss maybe, or his landlord. They’d knock on the door, wanting to collect their money, or rip him a new one for not showing up at his job. The door would get forced open, and then they’d see him dangling from his ceiling fan. 

Larry glanced up at the broken pole of the ceiling fan in the middle of his living room, and sighed. The one time he worked up enough courage to do it, and of course he’d turn out to be too heavy. 

He’d thought of poisoning, but apparently a lot of people survived that if they were found in time. With Larry’s employers, he’d be lucky if these 45 minutes weren’t getting interrupted for a clean-up on aisle 3.  
Drowning had been an idea too, but again the internet had proven a valuable tool. It was apparently the least fun way to go, and could lead to serious brain damage if you got saved in time. 

Freezing to death, was apparently the nicest death. Larry hadn’t even had to try that one on his own to find out that it wasn’t an option. Richard Watterson had, despite the restraining order, come into the Joyful burger for another meal. And in doing whatever it is the rabbit was doing, he had locked the Joyful Burger’s freezer behind Larry’s back.  
It had been discovered very quickly, but in another stroke of misfortune, the doorlock had gotten stuck, and it had taken almost a full 24 hours to get him out. He’d been making peace with his death, and wishing his job had allowed him to have his phone on him during work, so he could message Karen during his final moments. 

About 11 hours after losing the sensation of touch in his body and hearing his joints crack as if there was ice between them, Larry had realised that he was immune to the cold. Immune enough not to die from it, anyway. He’d gotten very sick, and he’d had to work while feeling like he was going to faint at any moment. 

So, he had finally settled on jumping from a high building. Or maybe the bridge. If he jumped from high enough, his body would snap into a dozen pieces, and end it all in an instant.  
And even though some people might recognise his body, and realise what he’d done, to most people he’d look like a small collection of broken rocks, and some clothes. He still had to decide if he wanted to wear one of his nametags. 

But first, the actual note. 

Larry bit on the end of his pencil, and stared down at the letter he’d started the last time he’d had some time. 

_Dear Karen,_

_I hope you were not the one to find me. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I know I’ve been neglecting you and everyone else. I’m not sad, or convinced that the world is unliveable, or something. I’m just too tired to keep going, and I don’t know how to get out of the circle I live in.  
I know you’ve been seeing other people _

Larry grabbed the paper, and scrunched it up. He didn’t want to blame Karen, or make her feel bad, but… well, he didn’t want to kill himself over just one aspect of his life. It was an amalgamation of things that made every waking moment a slog. 

He grabbed a new piece of paper, and began again.

_Dear Karen,_

_I’m sorry. I know I’m leaving you alone, and with a lot of guitl, and I never meant for this to happen, but I just can’t hold up anymore. You’re the only good thing in my life, and I know that you’ve been looking for a way out_

“No, no no.” He grumbled to himself, and he shoved the letter to the side for a new one. This time, he didn’t add Karen’s name. 

_I know this might seem a little drastic. I’m just working some extra jobs right? No reason to go and kill yourself, to a lot of people._

_My parents died… quite some time ago, and my little sister too. It was a house fire. And I KNOW. I KNOW that rocks are usually pretty good at surviving a fire, okay? It was the firemen. Mom and dad went in to get Rosetta from her room, and the fire had heated them all up, and when they came out, the firemen hit them with cold water from the hose_

Larry stopped writing, and wiped at his eyes. Images from their funeral flashed in his mind. They had burst, and… and nobody had quite been able to identify which parts belonged to whom. So in the end, he’d chosen to bury them in one coffin, just to be sure that he wasn’t filling three graves with a mishmash of three different people. 

He’d never been in debt before their death. He hadn’t had it large, but his parents had sent him pocket money whenever things got tight.  
“You’ll work your way up. Slow and Steady, as Needlemeyers do. Then, when you get a fat Payroll as a CEO of some company or the other, you can start thinking about paying us back.” 

_I never wanted to disappoint you, mom, dad. I never…. I work a ton of jobs, and I work them hard, but I’m not moving up. I don’t have the money for good food, or for a nice night out every once in a while. My fiancée, she loves me, but I can’t_

Larry was so tired. He knew the route to the roof of his apartment block. The door up was technically locked, but Larry had the key. He was the one they sent up to fix the TV reception when it was on the fritz, after all. He often stood at a short distance of the railing, and looked down at the parking lot below. A good six floors down, he knew that the ground would split his head like a ripe watermelon.  
Leaving the unfinished note, he pushed back his chair and left his apartment. He didn’t bother locking the door as he headed to the stairwell, and grabbed the key for the door that locked away the roof.

A few blank moments later, he was standing near the edge again, looking down. The cloudy night didn’t allow for the moonlight to reach Elmore, but the sputtering streetlights were plenty enough to see by. On the parkinglot below, there were marks of where Larry had dropped rocks to see if they would split. 

“Karen loves me.” Larry said out loud to himself. “I can’t do this to her.” His own voice sounded blank and stilted to his ears, but he had to finish writing his letter. His suicide note. He had to find a way to write down what he felt, so that she wouldn’t suffer after hearing that he’d killed himself. 

“She would be sad.” Larry bit on his thumb, hard enough to hurt. “She would wonder if I killed myself because of her, and she would feel horrible. And I don’t want that.” 

Didn’t he? 

Larry looked down, his knees feeling like overcooked spaghetti, and he imagined his own broken body on the parkinglot below, with Karen kneeling next to her.  
He imagined her crying, perhaps trying to rearrange the broken bits of his corpse back together like a puzzle. He imagined her losing her smile, for weeks on end, and tears springing to her eyes at the mere mention of his name. 

He imagined his bosses, perhaps under the fire of a public outrage. People demanding better healthcare for people working in low end jobs, holding up posters of his face. He imagined all the people who yelled at him as he did his job, now devoid of joy, feeling guilty for his death. Almost as if they had murdered him. 

Larry stopped. He had stepped closer to the edge, and the tips of his shoes were peeking over the edge. 

“That’s not… that’s not helping.” He said to himself. “Karen – I don’t want to hurt Karen, and that means I have to finish my note. So she understands.”

The excuse felt weaker every time he used it. Someday, even the idea of hurting Karen was not going to be enough to make him step back. The allure of just taking a step forwards was terrifying and exhilarating at once. Once he made that step, he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. He’d never see Karen again, and he wouldn’t have to see her cry. He’d never have to face the consequences of what he was about to do, and he’d be free to sleep and be at peace, forever. 

And Karen was so nice – she would understand, she wouldn’t take it out on him – she would know he wanted her to move on!

Shaking like a leaf, Larry shuffled closer to the edge. Tired as he was, even just a short moment of low blood sugar would be enough to send him to his death. He closed his eyes, and continued shuffling forward, wondering when his balance would give out- 

BEEP BEEP BEEP! 

The sound of a phone alarm going off had Larry almost jumping off the railing, and his heart jumped into his throat as vertigo hit him.  
Stumbling back, he fished his phone out of his pocket, hands trembling hard enough that it took him three tries to slide the pick-up icon to the right. 

“H-hello?” 

“Larry, where are you! Someone has left three packs of mozzarella in a panini maker and turned it on! It’s HUGE mess, why aren’t you cleaning it up yet!?” 

“It’s my break, sir.” Larry replied automatically. “I still have about –“ 

“I don’t give two flying birdcakes about your break. Get over here or you are fired!” There was an audible noise as his boss slammed down his phone, and then a short grumble before the old fuzzball remembered how to exit a call from a smartphone.

Shaken, Larry trembled his way down the stairs, past the open door of his apartment, and onto the street. It had been quite some time since he’d felt so…. So alive. So disconnected from the slog. The route to his job was brought into a sharp contrast, now that he had looked death in the eyes. 

As he entered his job, and stepped through the melted mozzarella towards the flaming paninimaker in the back of the Joyful Burger, he knew that he had earned some more time to work on his note for Karen. It was going to take a while before he dared to go up there again. 

He began cleaning the mozzarella from the paninimaker, as he heard the tell-tale ding of a customer entering despite the ‘We are CLOSED’ sign on the front door. 

“Welcome to Joyful Burger sir. How can I help you?”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is not meant to paint suicide in a romantic light, or to show it as a solution. It's as much a solution to life's problems as a fire is a solution to a sudoku. 
> 
> I wanted to show that, while Larry is depressed and suicidal, he knows what his death will do to the ones he cares about. It is the only thing that has stopped him from going through with it for a long time, but some day he is going to give in. 
> 
> My writing blog; insecwrites.tumblr.com


End file.
